[uxcn]

> Not strictly, no. While currently they only support the "hardware" in KVM/QEMU/VirtualBox, there's nothing stopping anyone implementing drivers for whatever hardware they want to run on, even bare metal.

Exokernels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel) essentially implement this. Hardware has been adding more support for virtualization though, so I imagine unikernels are better able to take advantage of things like virtualized page tables, virtualized io-mmu, etc...

I'd be curious to see benchmarks for something generally IO bound like PostgreSQL or HyperTable. IO scheduling isn't trivial, so it might give a good idea of what some of the trade-offs might be.